Table Of ContentPICATRIX
Liber Atratus
Books III & IV
translated by
John Michael Greer
Christopher Warnock
Renaissance Astrology
www.renaissanceastrology.com
Picatrix: Liber Atratus Edition Books III & IV
copyright 2012 John Michael Greer & Christopher Warnock
Renaissance Astrology
www.renaissanceastrology.com
Contents
Note on Kindle Versions of Picatrix
Translators' Introduction
The Picatrix in Context
The Picatrix and the Necronomicon
Picatrix in Practice
A Note on the Text
Warning and Disclaimer
PICATRIX
Book Three
Chapter One The parts of the planets that exist in plants, animals
and metals
Chapter Two Of the parts of the signs in the aforesaid three
existences, that is, plants, animals, and minerals
Chapter Three Of the figures, colors, garments, and incenses of
the planets, as well as the colors of the faces of the signs.
Chapter Four Why the secrets of this science may not be
understood except a little at a time
Chapter Five In which is demonstrated the virtue proper to
animals and noteworthy things necessary in this science, and how
the spirits of the planets are attracted by figures and
suffumigations
Chapter Six The magistery of drawing planetary spirits with
natural things, and what a magical image is and how it can have
this power
Chapter Seven Attracting the virtues of the planets, and how we
may speak with them, and how their influences are divided among
planets,
figures,
sacrifices,
prayers,
suffumigations,
and
propositions; and the state of the heavens necessary to each planet
Chapter Eight The way of prayer with which the Nabateans used
to pray to the Sun and Saturn, and how they would speak to them
and their spirits and draw forth their influences
Chapter Nine How to attract the powers of each planet and the
powers of their spirits, naming them according to their parts, and
how to accomplish this by speaking their names
Chapter Ten A demonstration of the confections of planetary
spirits, and preventing dangers from ceremonies and effects, and
of the wonders of magic, and of the food, suffumigations,
unguents, and odors that one who invokes planetary spirits ought
to use; and the proper effects, and works that are not done except
in appearance
Chapter Eleven The effects of magical images in diverse things,
as well as in alterations of sight, so that things are seen other than
as they are; and causing sleep and waking, and making poisons
and their remedies
Chapter Twelve Rules Necessary in this Science
Book Four
Chapter One By what virtue and force spirit proceeds, and what
are the properties of spirits, bodies, sense, intellect, and soul, as
well as the differences between them
Chapter Two What vigor the spirit of the Moon brings to this
inferior world, and what ought to be done with each of the seven
planets
Chapter Three What the Chaldeans held to be the profundities and
secrets of this science, and what they said about it
Chapter Four The images and reasonings that greatly further this
science
Chapter Five The ten sciences that are necessary to this art, and
how this science is helped by them, and what is the foundation of
the science of magic
Chapter Six How the suffumigations of the stars ought to be
made, and certain compositions necessary to this science
Chapter Seven The things of the magical art found in the book
The Chaldean Agriculture which Abudaer Abemiaxie translated
from the Chaldean language into Arabic
Description of Another Operation Which Kills by the Sound
When It Is Heard from Ibn Washiyya's Book of Poisons
Chapter Eight The virtues of other things which Nature does by
her own properties
Chapter Nine Images whose virtues perform marvels, that were
found in a book that was discovered in the church of Coredib and
the book of Queen Folopedre; and a description of all the rules
necessary in working with magical images
Glossary
Bibliography
Footnotes
Note on Kindle Versions of Picatrix
The Kindle Version of the Complete Picatrix Liber Atratus has been
released in two volumes: Books I & II of Picatrix and Books III & IV of
Picatrix. Together these two volumes contain all four books of the
Complete Picatrix. The release in two volumes was necessitated by
Amazon's pricing structure. Had we released a single volume with all four
books it would have cost as much as the paperback version despite not
needing printing or shipping! By releasing Picatrix as two volumes we
were able to cut the total cost of the E-books to half of the paperback! We
apologize, but we think readers would prefer the significantly lower cost.
The Translators' Introduction and commentary, bibliography and the
glossary appear in both volumes.
Please note that you can jump to a footnote text by tapping the
footnote number. You can then be returned back to the main text simply by
tapping the footnote number in the footnote text.
Translators' Introduction
In an age when such terms as "classic" are the everyday fare of
advertising copywriters, it is difficult to know how to introduce a genuine
classic of occult literature, but the book you hold in your hands is
impossible to describe in any other way. Originally written sometime in
the ninth century by an anonymous Arab wizard in North Africa or Spain,
and credited in the fashion of the time to the notable Sufi and scholar al-
Majriti, it was originally titled Ghayat al-Hakim, "The Goal of the Sage."
Like so many works of Arabic occultism, it eventually found its way
to Europe. It was translated into Spanish and Latin at the court of Alfonso
the Wise, King of Castile, in the year 1256, and received the new title of
Picatrix. Scholars to this day are uncertain what the name means. The
explanation that seems most plausible is that it is the Latin version of an
Arabic transliteration, perhaps Buqratis, of a Greek original; it is tempting,
though unprovable, to suggest that the name may have been Harpocrates,
the Hellenistic Egyptian god of silence and mystery. The Latin text makes
the mystery more intriguing by claiming that Picatrix was the name of the
book's author.
The influence of Picatrix on the magical traditions of the western
world was immense. Most of the significant scholarly occultists of the late
Middle Ages appear to have drawn on it, or on material borrowed from it
by other authors. Marsilio Ficino, whose translation of the Corpus
Hermeticum launched the Renaissance occult revival, borrowed heavily
from it for his pathbreaking Three Books on Life; Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy was even more extensively
influenced by Picatrix, and some of the leading figures in the English
occult renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Simon
Forman, Elias Ashmole and William Lilly, used it as a primary source for
their own magical work. With the end of the Renaissance and the rise of
the scientific materialism that dominated seventeenth-century culture,
however, Picatrix dropped from sight, and the revival of magic in the
western world that began in the middle of the 19th century passed it by.
Even today it remains the least known of the major works of western
occultism.
The Picatrix in Context
To understand why Picatrix had so great an impact on its own time,
and has been so thoroughly forgotten in ours, it needs to be recognized as
the extraordinary work it is. It is not simply a collection of magical recipes
and rituals, like the grimoires of a later period. Though it does contain
plenty of detailed instructions in magical procedures, its central focus is
philosophical; it is in fact the most extensive treatise on the philosophy of
magic to be written anywhere west of India between Iamblichus' On the
Mysteries of the fourth century and Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of
Occult Philosophy of the sixteenth.
The philosophy that grounds the magic of Picatrix is the same
theurgic Neoplatonism that fills both the books just mentioned, enriched,
as Agrippa's work also was, by the astrological mysticism that played so
large a role in the magical end of Neoplatonism after Iamblichus' time. To
Neoplatonists, among them the author and a great many of the readers of
Picatrix, the world was a hierarchy of levels of being, down which currents
of influence cascaded from the divine unity at its summit. The work of the
magician consisted of learning the ways of these currents, and drawing
upon them to perform magical works when they were at their strongest.
Picatrix was not simply a discussion of magical philosophy, however.
It contained an immense body of practical occult lore that had been
gathered up among Arab occultists over the two centuries or so before its
anonymous author put pen to paper. The practices of Neoplatonist theurgy
contributed a great deal to the collection, and so did the astral magic of
Mesopotamia; there are also workings in Picatrix that show close affinities
with the magic practiced in ancient Egypt, and others that are clearly
borrowed from Hindu tradition. No other book on magic from the Middle
Ages contains anything close to a comparable collection of magical
technique
Much of the magic taught in Picatrix, in addition, used a particular
procedure that could be found in few other sources. That procedure seems
to have determined the name used most often for magic in the Latin text,
nigromantia, which literally means "black divination", very nearly in the
sense that a modern book on espionage might refer to acts of sabotage and
the like as "black ops." Astrology, the principal method of divination in the
medieval world, was generally considered even by theologians to be a
legitimate and acceptable means of gathering information. What was not
acceptable to the orthodox was any more active use of the subtle currents
of influence that astrologers attempted to track, and this is exactly what
Picatrix taught. Its "black divination" focused on making talismans at
times precisely chosen for their astrological properties, so that a specific
influence radiated thereafter from the talismans for good or ill. Unlike the
later magic of the grimoires, these workings required little ceremony and
made only limited use of divine names and words of power; their
effectiveness came from the heavens.
The audience of Picatrix differed from that of many other medieval
occult texts as well, for its anonymous author states repeatedly that it is
solely intended for the use of members of a particular profession of his
time. The Latin text gives that profession the title sapiens; we have
translated it "sage," but there is another English word perhaps even better
suited to the connotations the author had in mind: "wizard."
It is too rarely remembered that legendary figures such as Merlin, and
their fictional equivalents such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Gandalf the Grey,
reflect an authentic medieval phenomenon: the freelance occultist-scholar
whose stock in trade was as much useful advice as magical powers, and
who aspired, and very occasionally rose, to the position of councilor to
kings. The author of Picatrix conveniently lists the qualifications for a
sapiens in Book IV, chapter 5; they include a good working knowledge of
the following topics: agriculture, seafaring, and politics; the military
sciences; "the civilized arts by which people are helped," including
grammar, languages, law, rhetoric, writing, and economics; the four
traditional branches of mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music; logic, with the works of Aristotle specifically singled out for study;
medicine; the natural sciences, and metaphysics, with Aristotle's writings
on these two subjects again specifically referenced.
From a modern perspective, this very demanding curriculum may
seem irrelevant to the work of a professional wizard. From within the
worldview of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was essential. Whether
he was earning a modest living by casting horary divinations in a
marketplace or leading a privileged life in a royal court, a wizard's job was
to provide sound advice to his clients. That advice would draw inspiration
from astrology or one of the other scholarly methods of divination
practiced at the time, such as geomancy, but it would also be informed by a
broad education in very nearly the entire body of useful knowledge that
had survived the decline and fall of the Roman world.
Nor, of course, did anyone in the Middle Ages or Renaissance
perceive the sort of rigid barrier between occult sciences, such as
astrology, and practical sciences, such as mathematics, that modern
industrial cultures consider self-evident. As Arthur Lovejoy usefully
pointed out many years ago in The Great Chain of Being, medieval and
Renaissance cultures understood the cosmos to be a unity, bound together
by connections and influences extending from the throne of God above the
heavens to the deepest recesses of matter. The arts and sciences had their
own proper place in that cosmos, and each branch of human knowledge,
however humble or exalted, cast a distinctive light on all the others. Thus
the sapiens, the sage or wizard of the medieval world, took all human
knowledge as his province and applied it to the challenging task of
providing sound guidance to his clients in a troubled and often brutal
world.
The Picatrix and the Necronomicon
The importance of the wizard as a professional found itself reflected
early on in literature and folklore, in such figures as Merlin the Mage and
Nectanebus, who played a Merlinesque role as magical instructor to
Alexander the Great in the medieval Alexander legends. The concept of
the magical book containing all the occult secrets of the universe similarly
found its way into the popular culture of the age. Just as wizards passed in
turn from medieval legend to modern fantasy fiction, in turn, the archetype
of the secret book of occult lore found a new home in modern literature,
and produced a remarkable parallel to Picatrix itself.
In a 1923 short story, "The Hound," pulp horror writer H. P. Lovecraft
first mentioned an imaginary tome of darkest magic titled the
Necronomicon, written by the equally fictional Arab wizard Abdul
Alhazred. The Necronomicon appeared frequently in Lovecraft's stories
from then on, along with other equally imaginary tomes such as the
Pnakotic Manuscript, and evolved into the core text of an imaginary
religion of evil: the cult of the Great Old Ones, terrifying beings from deep
space who had ruled the Earth in the prehistoric past and waited until "the
stars were right" to resume their dominion.
By 1927 the Necronomicon had become central enough to his
"Cthulhu Mythos" stories that Lovecraft wrote out a few pages on its
supposed history to help him keep his facts straight. According to this
document,[1] the original Arabic name of the book was Al Azif, and it was
compiled by Abdul Alhazred around 730 CE, drawing on forbidden lore
from Babylon, Egypt, and a lost civilization in the "Empty Quarter" of the
Arabian peninsula. Alhazred himself was devoured by an invisible
monster in the marketplace of Damascus in 738, but copies of his book
nonetheless got into circulation, and it was translated into Greek by
Theodorus Philetas in 950, who retitled it Necronomicon. (Lovecraft
interpreted this as "an image of the laws of death;" this is not quite
grammatical Greek, and a more accurate translation might be "Concerning
the Laws of Death," or possibly "Concerning Dead Laws.")
In 1228, the Danish scholar Olaus Wormius supposedly translated the
Necronomicon into Latin, and the famous British occultist John Dee,
Elizabeth I's court astrologer, made a manuscript English translation some
centuries later. From that point on, the history discusses how different
copies got into the places where it turned up in Lovecraft's stories and
those of other writers who borrowed his eldritch stage props, with his
enthusiastic permission, for their own horror tales.
By the last years of his life, Lovecraft was having to fend off requests
by fans and fellow writers that he find the time to manufacture the
Necronomicon. His work fell into obscurity for several decades after his
death, but it found newly appreciative audiences in the 1970s, and an
assortment of forged Necronomicons duly saw print thereafter. One,
written by a group of New York occultists under the pen name "Simon,"
appeared in a mass market paperback edition in 1980 and became wildly
popular among those members of the occult community (unfortunately no
small number) who had trouble telling the difference between pulp horror
fiction and genuine magic.
Among less credulous occultists, however, rumors began circulating
sometime in the 1990s that Lovecraft had modeled the Necronomicon on
Picatrix. This was admittedly only one of several stories that tried to link
the Necronomicon to some real work of magic, but the rumor gains a
certain degree of credibility from the remarkable parallels between the two
works. Like the Necronomicon, Picatrix was first written in Arabic,
translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, and circulated surreptitiously
among European occultists for centuries thereafter. Both books contain
detailed instructions for rituals meant to call down unhuman powers from
what we would now call outer space, and include malefic magical
workings of terrific power.
Lovecraft could easily have learned about Picatrix in time to use it as
a model for the Necronomicon, as the second volume of Lynn Thorndyke's
History of Magic and Experimental Science, which devotes an entire
chapter to Picatrix, was published in 1923. Still, the best study of the
Necronomicon so far, Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce's The
Necronomicon Files (2003), points out that Lovecraft's knowledge of the
occult was extremely limited, and there is no evidence that he drew on
anything but a few popular occult exposés in constructing the dire
rituals of his imaginary cult. Perhaps the safest generalization is that if
Picatrix did not exist, someone would have had to invent it, and this is
exactly what Lovecraft seems to have done.
Picatrix in Practice
Many of the readers of this translation, like the readers of the original
Arabic and Latin editions, will read it in the hope of learning how to
practice its magic. This can certainly be done, but three significant
obstacles must be confronted by anyone who hopes to learn the magic of
Picatrix and put it to work in today's world.
First, nearly all the magical traditions that fill the pages of Picatrix
and provided the medieval wizard with his stock in trade are unfamiliar to
most of today's occultists, and the magical philosophy that underlies them
will be even more so. Readers steeped in modern occult lore may be
startled to find that today's popular notion of magical power as a function
of the magician's will energizing forms in the imagination appears
nowhere in Picatrix. This should come as no surprise; the concept in
question was introduced to the magical traditions by Eliphas Levi in 1854
in his Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, which took it from the
philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and it existed nowhere in magical
teachings before that time.
Picatrix is the product of an older world, and its magic draws on a
conception of the nature of magic and the universe that differs in almost
every imaginable way from today's occult traditions. In the magic of
Picatrix, the sources of magical power are in the macrocosm rather than
the microcosm; power is native to the universe, not to the mage. Vast
currents of creative force set in motion by the Godhead itself cascade
downward through multiple levels of being. They are refracted by the stars
and planets like rays of light striking moving crystals, and descend to the
earth with greater or lesser force, depending on the complex geometries of
astrological relationship. The magician is the one who knows how to catch
these currents at the moments of their greatest power, store their energies
in material objects appropriate to them, and direct those energies to
carefully chosen ends.
The differences between modern occultism and the old magic of
Picatrix are sweeping enough that attempts to practice the workings in the
pages that follow from within the worldview of contemporary magic are
unlikely to get far or accomplish much. The student of Picatrix today
needs to start at the same place as his equivalent ten centuries ago, with a
thorough study of traditional astrology, as it was practiced in the Middle
Ages and Renaissance. Modern astrology is emphatically not an adequate
preparation, and in fact can all too easily be a barrier to understanding;
instead, close study of a standard text such as William Lilly's Christian
Astrology, followed by practical experience with the techniques it teaches,
will provide the necessary background. The distance learning courses
offered by Renaissance Astrology (http://www.renaissanceastrology.com)
provide another and, for many people, a more congenial way to gain the
same working knowledge of the ancient science of the stars.
The gap between ancient and modern magic and astrology, then,
forms the first of the three obstacles that must be overcome by the modern
student of Picatrix. The second unfolds from the gap between the medieval
culture that gave the old magic its social context and the modern industrial
cultures that do the same thing for our very different ways of thought.
Picatrix, to put matters bluntly, is not politically correct, and itt
contains plenty of things that will affront the modern reader. Name a hot-
button issue in contemporary culture, relations between the genders, the
legitimacy of political power, the ethics of using animals as raw material
for human activities, and more, and you may be sure that Picatrix offends
today's sensibilities on that issue, since it approaches that issue from
within the context of its own culture, rather than ours. Many readers will
find this intolerable, and even those who learn to tolerate it may find that
some things in the following pages make for uncomfortable reading.
In some cases, the gap has practical consequences as well. For
example, many of the confections described in Picatrix, combinations of
magically effective substances used to receive and apply the descending
influences of the heavens, include animal ingredients that are illegal for
private citizens to possess in the United States, and a great many others
contain substances that are very hard to obtain. Still others are stunningly
expensive, how many people can afford, say, to buy several ounces of pure
gold for a talisman of the Sun? In every case, there are alternatives, but it
requires careful study of Picatrix and other medieval magical texts to
identify them and learn how to adapt ancient recipes to modern conditions,
in the same way that the author of Picatrix and his medieval and
Renaissance readers adopted the magic they inherited to the needs of their
own times.
The author of Picatrix could easily have explained how to do this; at
several points in the course of the book, he demonstrates a rare talent for
